While waiting for the tarpon to begin to bite, we would pass the time catching smaller fish for the next morning's breakfast, red grouper, with their cavernous rosy-red mouth, very excellent eating; black ones of that ilk; king fish, an extremely difficult gentleman to catch, as he is very active and game for his size, and in colour and shape rather a cross between an eel and a mackerel; sea trout always welcome for the pot, or some unhappy fisherman perhaps would discover he had hooked a jew-fish, which would mean either hours of hauling and much expenditure of bad language and energy, or cutting the line and sacrificing hook and snood. The jew-fish is a horrible looking thing like a large pig, a dirty yellow in colour, covered with scales so minute that they look like a skin, and with a huge head. These fish generally weigh over 200 lbs., and fishermen naturally dread them, for they are absolutely unsporting and just bore down and down on the line, never jumping or showing any fight, but steadily resisting all efforts to raise them, till it is like trying to lift an elephant. But whenever or wherever you throw a line, a catch of some sort is a certainty, for the water simply teems with fish, and you probably get a different one every time, which adds greatly to the interest and excitement. In bottom-fishing, as it is up the river, the more rods you have out the more chances of bites, but at Captiva the fish bite so voraciously and so incessantly that two rods are as much as you can do with, one for yourself and one for the guide. Even then if you hook one fish out of every ten strikes, you do well. In bottom-fishing you wait for the fish to gorge the bait before striking. At Captiva you must strike the very instant you feel a bite, or otherwise the tarpon spits the bait out on feeling the line, and you must strike with all your strength too, for the tarpon's vast mouth is lined with a perfect coat of mail, in which there is but one soft spot, an inch or two in length, where the bones divide. The hook is put into the bait about two inches from the end, and the shank, seized to the end of the bait, is connected with the line by three feet of piano wire, which replaces the raw hide snooding in this Pass fishing, where there is so much strain on everything owing to the difference in the way the fish take the bait, and the tremendous tide running. You need a rather more limber rod too, to help you keep a tight line on your fish, no easy matter in very rough water. The fish are in innumerable thousands in the Pass, which they must all enter on their way up the river, and it is a fine sight to see the water literally alive with these splendid fish, all leaping and playing like minnows in a pond.